I said hello as I approached. He looked at me more in confusion than surprise.
Hello, he said.
We walked together for a short distance. Perhaps he had been ill, I thought. He was not so young, he had said himself of course that getting old was not easy. I thought he seemed worn out, but I could not ask if there was anything more. We strolled around to the other side, it seemed as though a line had been drawn across the ice at the southern end of the lake, a trail as if someone had walked there. He stopped to examine his winter shoes, one of the laces was slack, I looked away as he bent down to tie it, glancing out at the expanse of ice, the extremities that lay there, as though they were frozen solid. I regretted talking to him, I wanted to go. But then he stood up again, and we continued, on our way around the lake.
He said that when he was a child, some teenagers almost drowned in the water here. There was a huge rescue operation, and the youngsters were kept back by the adults. He recalled how he himself had raced down to have a look together with a crowd of other children and were held back.
There were people trying to crawl out to the water channel, he said, and they got the teenagers out in the end.
I glanced at him. As he spoke he was staring at the water, the ice.
My brother was one of them, he said.
I nodded.
He said he had always wondered what had caused them to go out onto the unsafe ice. Whether it was a feeling of invincibility or inertia that made some people try that kind of thing.
They were only young, of course, I said. He said yes, that I was right there.
I looked fleetingly at him. I thought he might say that something like that could cause one to doubt, but he did not say that. Besides it had ended well.
I’m so happy to be here, he said. But it gives me a guilty conscience.
I was uncertain whether he meant the place by the lake, where we were standing at that moment, or the church or simply existence in general.
He spoke softly, not like when he was preaching, when he was standing in the church. But it could have been part of a sermon. I waited for the rest of it, but he said nothing more.
He kicked a lump of ice over the hardened dirt, toward the surface of the lake.
Ice on water, he said. Otherwise it always seems to be raining here.
It will start again soon, I said.
Do you think so, he said and laughed. We both laughed.
We went back the same way.
And when I looked at him, I wanted to raise my hand and stroke his temple. I imagined doing that. What he would have said, his astonishment.
ONCE DURING THE course of that winter I went into the church and sat down, the door was open. I looked again at the altarpiece and the baptismal font. The space inside the church seemed brighter. The pews in front of me were empty, it was just as silent as the first time I had seen the pastor there.
After a while someone came and sat down at the far end of the same pew, when I turned around, it was the pastor. We sat there for a while without speaking, like the day he had walked with me and we had stopped for a second and looked at the water. Of course I didn’t know much about him, but when I saw him with people from the congregation, I gained the impression that he was well liked. Perhaps they were the ones he had, they were the ones he was attached to.
I thought now that the works were finished, he would not be there so often, he would not stand outside talking to the workers, following the work, they too would soon be finished with what they were doing. And the church door would be locked as it had always used to be.
LATER I TALKED to him a couple of times. It dawned on me that perhaps I was searching all the same for a listener in a context such as that. A backdrop, a superstructure that offered an opportunity. An opportunity for something I am unable to articulate. I could not walk by, that was what I felt. It was as if I had postponed something, and now I could not walk by, push it away any longer. The actual building located there, that I often stroll past on my walks, is like an assertion I have tried not to respond to, something I have delayed. I envy individual people their piety, their conviction. Those who have not appreciated the need for belief and consolation, they are truly naïve. Naïve enough to go to bed each night and get up again each morning without giving a thought to the despondency that surrounds them. But the need does not make one into a believer. At least it hasn’t done so for me. I would so like to understand. I have been at Sunday school and children’s lessons of course, but it is like different dots on a sheet of paper, suggesting the outlines of something, a certain shape, but there is no line drawn between them.
I like the actual story. The writer who is wise and reasonable, intelligible dramatic art, a plain and simple, but not stupid narrative, the narrator has his hidden intentions that will be revealed along the way, the protagonist falls into various traps, but first and foremost in order to learn from it, never so serious that he cannot be saved, and all the threads are drawn together in an inalterable conclusion.
When I recall clergymen from my youth, I remember best the distance, the respect. I have carried two of my daughters before men like them, I assume they really believe that they have had a call from God. As far as the baptism was concerned I did not go through with it because anyone insisted, it was just what one did. Then I held the tiny bare heads above the baptismal font and doubted as the sign of the cross was made from their forehead to their chest and from side to side, and just as much afterward. One of them screaming and sweaty and bundled up in a handed-down scrap of material one uses on that kind of occasion, the other silent and staring at me as if I were about to immerse her in the sea and let her drift down to its sandy bed. Solemn, resigned. The youngest is not baptized.
The interior, the sacristy. A place to go with a feeling of guilt. Perhaps you hand over the feeling of guilt in a church because you do not know what else to do with it. In order to find a place where significance is assigned to it, with no objections raised. There are so few places to go that you can attach significance to, as Marija once said.
The pastor probably thought I was a believer, or had become so in my old age, out of anxiety or regret.
The feeling of guilt. It belongs with that uneasiness, that transitory uneasiness that can surface when I wake during the night and lie there without falling asleep again. Did I want to seek out the church in order to hold that up against a background of deeper meaning? If I wished to be closer to the church. Can’t it simply have been a desire to be part of something, a context, or at least some kind of contact? But perhaps it is also partly a feeling of guilt. Guilt, that binds us to others just as much as every other emotion. Perhaps more.
HE WOULD HAVE been so much older now, my son, I have difficulty picturing him in my mind. I kept his clothes, the clothes he did not take with him. They are in the basement. I did not use them for the girls, I must have felt that they were his. Or perhaps it was for my own sake that I did not make use of them for any of the other children.
I went to find him, after all the years and the silent battle between us, Simon and me. Maybe I did it for Simon’s sake, but it may also have been for my own. I wanted to see who he had become, what he would say to me, whether I had caused anything, any harm. It was only a couple of years ago. I found the name Simon had kept safe and looked up an address in a newly renovated area. I stood for a while on that street, looking at the entrance to an apartment block where the residents were coming and going, and at one point I spotted a youngish man and two little girls emerge from the stairway at the front of the building, one of the girls had an umbrella under her arm that she was trying to open, her father tried to help her, and after several attempts the child obviously became impatient and rushed inside the entrance, with her father following after. The door slammed behind them. I thought that it could have been him, for a second I thought that, but I knew it did not add up. It wasn’t him, he was too young. I hesitated slightly before finding the apartment number I had been given, and finally rang the doorbell. I stood on the sidewalk and glanced up at the façade. There was traffic in the street, cars driving past. A woman leaned out from one of the windows above me, supporting herself with her forearms on the windowsill, taking a couple of puffs of her cigarette, peering down at me, before closing the window again. No one opened the door, I rang the doorbell a few more times. There was no one at home, perhaps I was just there at the wrong time of day.